The past few years have brought an explosion in new commercial sequencing kits that allow biotechs to measure molecular state with greater throughput, complexity and accessibility.
These new kits generate a lot of data and analyzing it is becoming increasingly difficult. Because scientists will not purchase more kits unless they successfully analyze their data and answer their biological questions, kit providers need to carefully think through and manage this analysis for customers.
Here we walk through best practices for the creation, distribution and troubleshooting of analysis packages for sequencing kit providers.
Creating Analysis Packages
To provide their customers with the tools necessary to understand their data, kit providers often develop their own bioinformatics workflows and visualization tools specific to their technology. These tools often have complex software dependencies and large resource requirements that make them difficult to install and run on customer computers.
Kit providers have therefore seen great success deploying “packages” of containerized and versioned software tools that run in a managed cloud environment.
They assemble data, workflows and visualization tools into bundles they can distribute directly with their kits.
These versioned software tools can be managed and updated individually as features are added and bugs are fixed. These packages greatly simplify the operational overhead of managing software for hundreds of customers and associating them with different kits versions and types.
Distributing Analysis Packages
Kit providers create redeemable codes that can be embedded in QR codes or one-pagers inserted into each kit.
Codes are created for each kit and dashboards allow kit providers to monitor the redemption status of all of their customers.
Providers are also able to send their customers emails to let them know about the analysis package.
Monitoring Analysis Status and Troubleshooting
When kit customers redeem their codes, it is important that providers monitor the status of their analysis and ensure they are able to arrive at the end insight. Scientists are unlikely to purchase more kits if they are unable to answer their biological questions.
Each customer redemption links directly to customer workspaces with instances of the managed software tools and data.
Customer success engineers are able to monitor logs and help their customers resolve issues.
LatchBio is a White-Labeled Data Portal
Latch is a team of engineers and bioinformaticians building data infrastructure for biotech R&D. We have partnered with incredible providers, like Curio Bioscience, AtlasXOmics, Fluent, BrokenString Biosciences, who use our platform to help customers get more value from their kits.
Find some time to meet our team at latchbio.com.
